Remember Them? [8.18.2007]

[suze900]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU4nQTp-LVM

"Jonas, pay attention to what you see."

Jonas's parents!

[oweniscool]

I really am not feeling these Rezisto videos. There's just nothing else to say about it. More garbled English/Spanish/Esperanto, more green on black, more weird dude with the green eyes (even though we didn't see those this time). Congrats to everyone who predicted that Season2 would have to do with Jonas's parents, and here's another gold star for the ones that said LaRezisto would be recruiting Jonas and Daniel back from their normal lives.

[Terryfic]

Remember Them? Remember Me?

This has got to be the worse OpAphid rip off possible. Even down to the semi-digitized soft spoken womans voice. I half expected the video to end with "Oh My" or something.

If they really wanted to do this they should have just rehired Glenn as he can do it way way better then them. Seriously, compare Remember Them? ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU4nQTp-LVM ) with Remember Me? ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUZL0aYHVUM ) and tell me you can't spot the original and the impersonator

[robtomorrow]

Jeromy insinuated on the Phorum in the TOS debate that the C's were stealing their ideas, ( Kate going to a clinic and then loosing her memory, a seemingly close resemblance to Rachel's story a week earlier). Greg pointedly denied it.

You can't help but be suspicious though, twice is quite a coincidence.

[suze900]

The languages are English, Spanish, and Romanian. LGPedia has a good translation up already (at least it looks good to me, I know no Romanian.)

[Alissa Brooke]

oh, blah. I don't like these ones.

[suze900]

terryfic said:

This has got to be the worse OpAphid rip off possible. Even down to the semi-digitized soft spoken womans voice. I half expected the video to end with "Oh My" or something.

If they really wanted to do this they should have just rehired Glenn as he can do it way way better then them. Seriously, compare Remember Them? ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU4nQTp-LVM ) with Remember Me? ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUZL0aYHVUM ) and tell me you can't spot the original and the impersonator

Well, I looked at them both. Disclosure: I found all the Cassie-Oppy-Tachy-Brother hoopla on the phorum obscure and irritating, even when it was canon, and still do. Having said that, the newest Opaphid vid seems more of a ripoff of LG15 than the other way around, especially at the end with the "girl in white, on a white background, opening her closed eyes" motif, which was much more attractive when Jessica did it. The whole "my whole existence has been a lie" business seems derived from LG15 too. But then I'm no expert, I just know what I like. And Oppy/Tacky and crew don't do much for me.

LaRezisto is mystifying too, but I was intrigued by this video, perhaps because of the unexpectedly intense 60's memories it triggered. I remember watching nuclear explosion footage like that in grade school, along with tips on how to survive a nuclear holocaust. Hiding under our desks was about all they could offer us, which even then seemed pretty lame to me. <wanders OT, mumbling about childhood memories and swigging from a bottle of Geritol>

[robtomorrow]

suze900 said:

Having said that, the newest Opaphid vid seems more of a ripoff of LG15 than the other way around, especially at the end with the "girl in white, on a white background, opening her closed eyes" motif, which was much more attractive when Jessica did it. The whole "my whole existence has been a lie"

Suze, the girl in white has been a trademark of Oppy since the very first videos.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNbe9R7TgPw

[Terryfic]

robtomorrow said:

suze900 said:

Having said that, the newest Opaphid vid seems more of a ripoff of LG15 than the other way around, especially at the end with the "girl in white, on a white background, opening her closed eyes" motif, which was much more attractive when Jessica did it. The whole "my whole existence has been a lie"

Suze, the girl in white has been a trademark of Oppy since the very first videos.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNbe9R7TgPw

Or you can look at the first usage in LG of bathing a character in white light which was another similarly named video Miss Me? which unless I'm mistaken was Glenn's LG directorial debut.

I will agree though that during OpAphid's first run that it never meshed with LG very well and I wasn't much of a fan. The videos were cool looking and all, but lacked substance - that substance was found in the ARG, but I wasn't interested in playing so it all felt pretty empty to me. Interestingly, Op was a far better and more interesting series before it became canon, and I suspect that it now no longer is that it will start picking up steam again. It is a much better match to have Op vs Linc than Op vs Bree. I just really hope it doesn't start telling absolutely integral parts of the story via the ARG elements.

ETA: There is nothing wrong with ripping off someone else's style, I do it all the time myself. But it looks shabby when they are a former employee. Plus for a revolution channel there are such cooler styles to rip off - Like the style of Animated Soviet Propaganda www.youtube.com/watch?v=L66r-RVKJpQ it may not be as flashy, but it is way way awesomer than glowing green eyes. For an example of what I am talking about see what happens when you combined that style with Mario - The People's Mario

[suze900]

robtomorrow said:

Suze, the girl in white has been a trademark of Oppy since the very first videos.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNbe9R7TgPw

Ah, I knew I was probably betraying my profound ignorance of the Opry phenomenon

Having said that, and watched the video, I still say: bleh.

Now I have a question for the knowledgeable: since everyone (but me) thinks they're so great, why don't Glenn et al break off and start their own deal, like LG15? Why don't they do what the Cs have done?

[Terryfic]

suze900 said:

Now I have a question for the knowledgeable: since everyone (but me) thinks they're so great, why don't Glenn et al break off and start their own deal, like LG15? Why don't they do what the Cs have done?

Psst. Take a look at the 15OVER15 section sometime.

12th Street House (run by Jeromy, and currently employing Glenn) is similar to Telegraph Ave (run by the c's) but it didn't pull off an international hoax to get tons of press attention... yet. Their goal is to instead of scaling things up with huge big name sponsors is to create a framework so that internet series and ARGs can be done on the small scale for local businesses. I'm not sure if it will work, but it sounds fascinating and the best part is that they aren't pretending to be a big time player so there is no spin machine.

15OVER15 is a curious series, if you don't like the Op\Linc angle you can watch the older redearth videos (which I hope we haven't see the end of) or if you want a more serious dramatic mockumentary style you can watch Clara and Maddy season 2, plus there is always adamlamarTV for a laugh in between. The one big downside to the series is that it is not making any profit at the moment so the videos are far less regular. The transition from non-profit to profit series is a very hard one and I really hope they are able to pull it off as they make videos that look phenomenally finished.

[suze900]

Thanks, Terry.

[milowent]

this is not really that derivative of opaphid in my mind. i mean, glenn has made some good visuals, but he's not totally reinventing the wheel when he does it.

to me, this method of delivery of footage of jonas' parents is not satisyfing. there's no reason i can think of that La Rezisto would do it in this multilingual green-tinged hyper MTV style video method. i could imagine it be shaky footage with a digitized voice (to avoid recognition) done by private transmission to Daniel, Jonas, Sarah, Taylor and Spencer. (is there a name for that crew other than TAAG? Oh.. the BLJ is it Terry? :-) ) i may have to start using that.

---

lgpedia is good for the translations

www.lg15.com/lgpedia/index.php?title=Remember_Them%3F

[Terryfic]

milowent said:

this is not really that derivative of opaphid in my mind. i mean, glenn has made some good visuals, but he's not totally reinventing the wheel when he does it.

Yes, you are totally right Milo, Glenn is far from the inventor of these techniques used to establish a mood. But he is pretty apt at using them. I still think there is more the one way to skin a 'cool' video and these look very OpAphid derivative to me, if it were anyone else I wouldn't care. It is all because fired Glenn, yet are trying to retain his 'look'. The results is this videos still look like fan fiction to me, some kind of mishmash of an old OpHead making a video about LG.

Plus the fact that 15OVER15 keeps releasing storylines and events that are similar to LG but occur 2 weeks ahead of time isn't helping things. First they did the many videos in one day, then the blood test = memory loss, now the resistance with a similar named video looking and sounding a lot like Op. I think these are all coincidences, but LG should try to beat 15/15 to the punch at least once.

Ok, finally onto the content of the video. I think there is a very thin line for how powerful the c's can make the resistance for this to make sense at all. They have to be strong enough for it to be worthwhile of the JLB to join, yet not strong enough that they actually require the help of some rich kid whose only special skill is looking hawt and getting stabbed. I'm not sure if they have met that balance yet.

[elixir]

These videos grind my gears.

I agree with everything you said Terry and Milo. These are like the Op videos. Why can't they venture out and do something different for once? And it doesn't really make any sense to have such a pimped out and complicated video merely to deliver a message to a few select people.

Are we just supposed to assume that everyone in the Breeniverse is an attention seeking whore who has to perfect their videos right down to mixing fully-sick tunes whilst they are on the run, or mixing footage of random 50s people while they are trying to deliver an urgent message?

The so-called clues in this video - I mean in-plot - they just don't have much of a valid purpose. Fine, fine "identity issues".... (such a cop out). If this was real the Resistance wouldn't be relying on hundreds of fans to figure this stuff out. It should be Jonas. But what is Jonas meant to do? "Ummm... okay so my parents are in Spain... or is that Romania?? Or a Spanish community in Romania? Was I born in the 1950s and sent to the future to fight the Order? When am I getting my nuclear bombs?? And do I have super radio-active powers yet???"

I give up. *sigh* I stopped questioning things seriously ages ago; why did I start again??